Islamic State: more massacres

Last Friday, in France, an Islamist named Yahya Salhi killed his employer, Herve Cornara. He attached the victim's severed head to the fence around a chemical plant, together with a cloth saying "There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet" — and then rammed his vehicle into a warehouse full of chemicals hoping (but failing) to cause a massive explosion.

In Kuwait two hours later, Fahd Suleiman Abdulmohsen al-Qaba'a, a Saudi citizen, entered a Shia mosque and detonated a bomb that killed at least 25 people. He was presumably a Sunni fanatic sent by "Islamic State" to kill Shias, who they believe are heretics who should be killed.

In Tunisia one hour later, 38 European tourists, most of them British, were massacred by a 23-year-old man with a Kalashnikov on a beach in Sousse. The perpetrator, Seifeddine Rezgui, was studying engineering at a university in Kairouan, an hour's drive west of Sousse.

Islamic State, which has carved out a territory in Iraq and Syria that has more people and a bigger army than half the members of the United Nations, immediately claimed responsibility for all three attacks. Yahya Salhi may have been a lone-wolf head case, but in the other two cases the claim was almost certainly true.

But there was another attack that you probably didn't hear about. Kobani, the Kurdish town in northern Syria that withstood a four-month siege by Islamic State troops last year, came under attack again last Thursday. About a hundred young Islamists in Humvees and pickup trucks drove into town and shot 220 people dead in the streets and in their houses.

So 64 murders that you heard a lot about, and 220 others you heard little or nothing about. There are hundreds of innocent people being murdered by Islamist fanatics in Syria every week, so it's no longer news. Besides, the motive there is obvious: it's just Islamic State trying to expand its territory in Syria. But as for the others....

Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, responded to the deaths of thirty British citizens in Tunisia by trotting out the same shopworn drivel that Western leaders have been peddling for the past 14 years. The fight against Islamic State is "the struggle of our generation," Cameron declared. Indeed, IS poses "an existential threat" to the West.

Maybe Cameron doesn't know what the word "existential" means. Could somebody please explain to him that he is saying that Islamic State poses a threat to the continued existence of the West? Does he really think that is the case?

Forgive me for making a cold-blooded calculation, but sometimes it is necessary. The population of the West (not counting the countries of Latin America, which don't play in this league) is about 900 million. Thirty-nine "Westerners" have been killed in attacks by Islamist terrorists this month. At this rate, the West will have ceased to exist in 1.9 million years. If this is an existential threat, it's not a very urgent one.

In fact, it's not really about the West at all. The European victims on the beach in Sousse were killed in order to destroy the tourism that provides almost 15 per cent of Tunisia's national income, and thereby destabilize the only fully democratic country in the Arab world. The extremists' real goal is to seize power in Tunisia; the Western victims were just a means to that end.

The bombing of a Shia mosque in Kuwait was intended to increase tensions between the Sunni majority and the large Shia minority in that country, with the ultimate goal of unleashing a Sunni-Shia civil war in which Islamist extremists could take over the Sunni side as they have already done in Syria and Iraq.

Only the lone-wolf attack in France could be conceivably be seen as directed at the "West" — although that might also have been just a personal grievance wrapped up in an Islamist justification.

The rest of the killing was about who controls the Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East, as it has been from the start. Even 9/11 was about that, designed not to "bring America to its knees," but to lure it into an invasion of Afghanistan that Osama bin Laden believed would stimulate Islamist revolutions in Muslim countries. The Islamists do "hate Western values," but they have bigger fish to fry at home.

Islamic State and the various incarnations of Al Qaeda (the Nusra Front in Syria, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, etc,) pose an existential threat to the non-Sunni Muslim minorities of the Middle East, and even to Sunni Muslims whose beliefs diverge significantly from those of the Islamists. The West should help governments in the region that protect their minorities, and of course it should try to protect its own people.

But this is not the "struggle of our generation" for the West. It should be nowhere near the top of its own list of priorities.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.